Forty Years Later: The Nazi Heartland

It would be nice to report that I saw it all coming, that winter of 1932 in Munich. The fact is, though, 1 was too steeped in other interests—German music, Italian painting, American girls—to be more than irritated to find the easy-going Bavarians taking this obviously mad Austrian orator so seriously. I saw him often enough in civilian garb (SA uniforms were banned that winter), entering the Brown House a couple of blocks from where I was living in the Jägerstrasse; or eating strawberry tarts piled high with whipped cream in the Carleton Tea Room, just around the corner on the Maximilians-platz. He looked—quite ordinary. Except for the night 1 went to the Zirkus Krone and was caught up momentarily in those waves of emotion that swept through the crowd as he denounced the injustice of making Germany alone pay for a war that every Continental power had helped provoke. But I had heard Dr. Goebbels ranting on the radio from the Berlin Sportspalast, too, and was well aware that the uninvolved Jews far more than the vindictive French were being made the scapegoats for Germany’s economic and psychological problems.

There were two sorts of occasion on which I was caught up in it all. And deeply frustrated. One, repeated almost daily, was at breakfast or lunch with my kindly middle-class landlords in the Jägerstrasse. Herr Klöck and his wife (Frau Apotheker Klöck) were conservative, Catholic, and always on the verge of bankruptcy. Their only child, Moti, aged 14, was a typical “war baby” —pale, blond, anemic, idealistic, and so susceptible to the “shame” of Germany’s defeat in the war, and the inflation and revolutions that followed, that her eyes would fill with tears whenever the word “Versailles” was mentioned.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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It would be nice to report that I saw it all coming, that winter of 1932 in Munich. The fact is, though, 1 was too steeped in other interests—German music, Italian painting, American girls—to be more than irritated to find the easy-going Bavarians taking this obviously mad Austrian orator so seriously. I saw him often enough in civilian garb (SA uniforms were banned that winter), entering the Brown House a couple of blocks from where I was living in the Jägerstrasse; or eating strawberry tarts piled high with whipped cream in the Carleton Tea Room, just around the corner on the Maximilians-platz. He looked—quite ordinary. Except for the night 1 went to the Zirkus Krone and was caught up momentarily in those waves of emotion that swept through the crowd as he denounced the injustice of making Germany alone pay for a war that every Continental power had helped provoke. But I had heard Dr. Goebbels ranting on the radio from the Berlin Sportspalast, too, and was well aware that the uninvolved Jews far more than the vindictive French were being made the scapegoats for Germany’s economic and psychological problems.

There were two sorts of occasion on which I was caught up in it all. And deeply frustrated. One, repeated almost daily, was at breakfast or lunch with my kindly middle-class landlords in the Jägerstrasse. Herr Klöck and his wife (Frau Apotheker Klöck) were conservative, Catholic, and always on the verge of bankruptcy. Their only child, Moti, aged 14, was a typical “war baby” —pale, blond, anemic, idealistic, and so susceptible to the “shame” of Germany’s defeat in the war, and the inflation and revolutions that followed, that her eyes would fill with tears whenever the word “Versailles” was mentioned.